ASP.NET

Our readership survey is in!

The vast majority of SearchWinDevelopment.com readers are using modern tools, but a significant number of them are also interested in maintaining legacy applications, according to a readership survey conducted by the site.

A preliminary look at the survey reveals that 87% are using Visual Studio 2008 or 2005. About 65% of respondents use one of those versions as their primary IDE.

.NET languages are very popular; legacy code also important

Three quarters of all respondents reported using one of the two main .NET languages, C# and VB.NET; for half of respondents, one of those languages is what they do most of their coding in. C# is the more popular language by a significant (but not overwhelming) margin of 48% to 38%. Legacy code is still important, though. One fifth of readers use C++ and almost a third use VB6 or earlier, although only 15% of all respondents use those older languages as their main programming language.

Interestingly, the “use at all” to “use as primary” stats aren’t symmetric within .NET. As I noted above, 48% of readers use C# and 38% use VB.NET. But while 36% of readers use C# as their primary coding language, only 17% use VB.NET as their primary. That means that 75% of respondents who use C# do so for most of their programming (36 / 48 = .75), but only 45% of VB.NET coders use that language as their primary.

Web development is huge, but not quite cutting edge

Unsurprisingly, Web development is very popular. Just over half of all SearchWinDevelopment.com readers work with ASP.NET. For most of those, Web development is their main responsibility. But despite the Web 2.0 craze, Silverlight isn’t nearly as popular.

Ajax development is strong, but relatively diverse. That is probably due in part to Microsoft changing strategies: although it has its own Ajax framework, the company recently decided to officially back the popular library jQuery and incorporate it into IntelliSense. About 30% of ASP.NET developers use ASP.NET AJAX, 23% use jQuery and 15% use another framework.

What you’re doing, and how you’re doing it

In case you’re wondering how other Windows developers get things done, the top four most popular programming methodologies are waterfall, extreme programming (XP), Agile and Scrum. But about a quarter of you aren’t employing any methodology at all! That could be because almost a third of respondents work in an environment with fewer than five programmers, but it’s still a bit surprising.

And as for what you’re doing, the majority of our survey respondents said that improving performance one of their architectural challenges. That’s to be expected, but what stands out is that that’s the only architectural challenge that a majority of our readers are facing. Almost 60% of our readers listed performance as a challenge their company is facing; the next popular choice, implementing a workflow, weighed in at about 42%.

Those are topics we haven’t covered extremely closely, so that feedback is great to have.

Lastly, it’s clear that many of you are interested in learning new tools and technologies. We asked readers to rank their interest in nine topics, including software-as-a-service and open source software, which Microsoft is warming up to. Most of the topics trended toward “highly interested,” with only scripting languages and grid computing technology trending toward disinterest. That might not bode well for Microsoft’s latest push to promote PHP on Azure.

Look for a more in-depth analysis of the survey in the coming weeks. In the meanwhile, to all of our readers who took the survey, our deep thanks!

Microsoft puts ASP.NET MVC out as open source

Here’s a funny April Fool’s joke: Microsoft’s MVC is going open source, according to a blog post by Scott Guthrie on Wednesday.

But the punch line isn’t that MVC is really closed source — it’s that the headline a legitimate, non-April-Fool’s-joke news. I didn’t quite believe it until I went and grabbed the source code, but there it is. ASP.NET MVC is open source.

Guthrie didn’t explain why the move was made in his blog, but it’s consistent with Microsoft’s Web strategy. The company has already released several Silverlight components as open source, it’s working with Novell to develop an open source implementation of Silverlight, and it even worked with a company called Soyatec to put out a Silverlight development plug-in for Eclipse, the open source, Java-based IDE.

When I talked to the principle architect on Microsoft’s interoperability team about the latter, he said he sees open source purely as an interop strategy: “it hasn’t impacted Microsoft’s larger licensing models,” he told me. And yet, Microsoft seems to inch ever-closer to being a major player in the open source world.

The overall direction Microsoft seems to be taking is that the technologies higher up in the stack are candidates for open source, but its foundational technologies are still closed and proprietary. Microsoft’s MVC may be free, but you’ll need to run it on something; Microsoft is hoping you’ll pick Windows Server with ASP.NET 3.5 rather than an open source solution like Mono.

In other words: the idea is free, but the implementation will cost you.

ASP.NET Ajax Roundtable

The Ajax interface has proved an interesting animal. Many people trace asynchronous JavaScript use back to Microsoft’s early Outlook Web clients, but it was not promoted by Microsoft much until open-source AJAX [for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML] as used by Google became popular about three years ago. Then, Microsoft embraced it wholeheartedly, creating its own ASP.NET Ajax version of AJAX, and saving some trouble for its developer legions. Yet, third parties still have a role to play in moving ASP.NET Ajax forward, as  SearchWinDevelopment.com’s Vendor roundtable series can attest.

ASP.NET Ajax Roundtable Part 1 - Browser Compatibility

ASP.NET Ajax Roundtable Part 2 - Resurgence in JavaScript

ASP.NET Ajax Roundtable Part 3 - Open Source

ASP.NET scaling the Web

Richard Campbell and Kent Alstad of Strangeloop recently presented strategies to improve scaling in the ASP.NET environment. They look at some performance forumlae, and look at the challenging issues in measuring each performance element.

“The ASP.NET techniques that work effectively for 10,000 simultaneous users aren’t as effective with 100,000 users, and the rules change again with 1 million users,” they write in an MSDN article.

Among the many tips they impart: Always test your caching code for these complex scenarios.

Using Master Pages in Visual Studio 2008

The way you use Master pages has changed in Visual Studio 2008.  Remember, how in Visual Studio 2005 when you add a new Web Form in ASP.NET applications - you get to choose a master page to apply to the Web form.  If you choose to use a Master page - then the page that is added, when you check the HTML code for that page - it is stripped of all the standard HTML tags - only the Page directive and the <asp:Content> tags are available.  This is a Content page.

In Visual Studio there are two types of Web Forms available - Web Form and the Web Content Form. 

The Web Form is a standard Web Form - without the Master page, with its HTML code like a standard HTML page.  Whereas, the Web Content Form is the one to which you can attach a Master page.

The Web Form page also has a MasterPageFile property.  But, if you create a Web Form and then set the MasterPageFile property to link to your Master page you will get a run time error.

Content controls have to be top-level controls in a content page or a nested master page that references a master page.

This is because content pages must not have another other HTML tags or controls. 

If you want to use Master Pages use Web Content Form, otherwise use the Web Form.

Another nice feature in Visual Studio 2008 - is that in that in the top right corner of the Design window of the Web content page is a link to the Master page that this page is linked to.  Also, the “Split” view is cool.. you can now see the source and the design view tiled in the design area.

Community Server steward Telligent rolls out Graffiti CMS engine

nbsp;SearchWinDevelopment.com recently caught up with Rob Howard, who graced these pages in the Pre Silverlight Days. Howard rode the first blog wave at Microsoft, and has continued on the social networking trail as head of Telligent, provider of Community Server, a blogging application running on the ASP.NET platform.

Recently, Telligent has launched Graffiti, which takes a big conceptual step up the stream from blogging. Graffiti is a Content Management System [CMS], which is what people find they need when they bash about in the blogpond long enough.

Trouble with CMS is: There is a wide spectrum with not too many nodes along the way. You have the big vendors [Vignette, Interwoven] with rich products and pricey price tags on one spectra end .. and on the other end there is WordPress and Blogger with low cost and low features. Telligent sees opportunity.

Graffiti is a light weight CMS platform, Howard told us. It is a good fit in a more disparate environment, he indicated. He said many companies are beginning to field more than a single CMS type. They are supporting what he calls ‘niche focused publishing platforms.’

As with past Telligent efforts, Graffiti runs on ASP.NET. But this time, it also runs on Linux and Mac OS, and Mono. It supports various DBs, including MySQL.

Telligent has more in store. Besides upcoming new revs of Community Server, there is the Harvest Reporting suite due from the company. Said Howard, it rolls up 130 pre-built reports that let blogmeisters slice and dice their community data. Blogging may be a commodity item, yes. But the software the grows up around the blogging phenomenon  may be industries onto themselves. With its stabs at CMS and reporting, Telligent may point the way toward a trend.

Lang.NET shows Iron Python with Robotics Studio, JScript on DLR

Microsoft’s Lang.NET Symposium 2008 got up and running yesterday. C# father Anders Hejlsberg talked about C# 3.0 features, IronPython guru Hugunin discussed the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) and IronPython, and Pratap Lakshman from the JScript team talked about the new managed implementation of JScript, codenamed Managed JScript.

Hejlsberg, as reported by blogger extraordinaire Ted Neward, told the assembled language heads that the conventional divisions of language types (into categories) covering the functional, the object-oriented, and so on will break down in the years ahead.

IronPython high priest Jim Hugunin did a demo that mixed Microsoft Robotics Studio code with IronPython running on the DLR. Hugunin’s creation, IronPython, was recently updated as IronPython RC 1.1.1 on CodePlex.  Hugunin created Jython, a Java version of Python.

IronPython 1.0 was debuted in September 2006. The latest release candidate is described as a minor update focused on bug fixing. Hugunin’s team has fielded IronPython 2.0 Alpha 1, as well. This is the first release of IronPython built on the DLR, and targeting version 2.5 of Python.

For his part, Pratap Lakshman provided an overview of the managed Jscript implementation originally discussed at MIX07.  JavaScript on top of the DLR became a reality as part of Silverlight 2.0 (then known as Silverlight 1.1).

Surprise guests at the symposium were Java specialists John Rose and Charles Nutter, who discussed Java’s increasing support of new languages on the JVM.

Planned Day 2 discussions at Lang.NET 2008 include Eric Meijer on Volta, Paul Vick on Visual Basic and Karl Prosser ”Powershell Plus. ”

How does ASP.NET Ajax rate among Ajax frameworks?

There’s Ajax and there’s Ajax. There is Ajax in the Java world where it’s no-holds-barrred, Katy-bar-the-door, and find-yourself-a-framework-or-die. Then there is Ajax in the .NET world where Microsoft created its own Ajax framework which is offered to you  as part of the company’s other Web development offerings.  

However, Microsoft’s Ajax framework is not the sole Ajax framework available to .NET developers. And at least one blogger thought it was worthwhile to query the Web audience to see how .NET Ajax framworks stacked up.

Italian Simone Chiaretta, .NET developer and Subtext core member, was spurred in his quest by the recent Richard Monson-Haefel Ajaxian survey on Ajax framework use, but wanted to see what things looked like for .NET. Chiaretta found —  lo-and- behold  – that Microsoft’s ASP.NET Ajax was tops by far among responders.He writes:

… among the 95% of the .NET developers that said they are using some flavor of Ajax either in production, development or prototype, the most-used Ajax toolkit is ASP.NET Ajax, with 73,7%, followed by the Ajax Control Toolkit which is used by almost half of the .NET developer that are using Ajax.

Despite, Microsoft’s predominance, there is percolating use of other Ajax frameworks amid the .NET crew. Interestingly, among ASP.NET users cited in Monson-Haefel’s survey, ASP.NET Ajax use is represented by 36.3% of responders, and is in a statistical dead heat with Prototype and jQuery open-source alternatives. Writes Burton Group’s Monson-Haefel:

What is interesting about the Ajax market is that it’s more diversified in 2007 than it was in 2005 - the number of toolkits keep growing and jostling position in terms of usage.

Check out the .NET Ajax Survey, the Monson-Haefel Ajax survey, and filter of Monson-Haefel’s data.

ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions — Silverlight, Astoria, the MVC, oh my!

Microsoft is taking this season of giving thing pretty seriously.

First there was Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. Then there was ParallelFX, an update to the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and a toolset for programming Silverlight 1.1 — oops, we mean Silverlight 2.0 — in Visual Studio 2008.

The latest contribution is the ASP.NET 3.5 Extension CTP. This, as Scott Guthrie explains, includes a bunch of stuff. There’s better history support for ASP.NET AJAX, tools for speedier development of data-driven Web sites and support for Silverlight.

Two things in particular jump out.

One is the ASP.NET MVC, or Model View Controller. This is a much ballyhooed framework for dividing the components of a Web application into models (which maintain state), views (which display UI) and controllers (which handle end user interactions). As Guthrie puts it in his introduction to the MVC, “Maintaining a clean separation of concerns makes the testing of applications much easier, since the contract between different application components are more clearly defined and articulated.”

The other is ADO.NET Data Services, previously known as Astoria and intricately linked to the forthcoming ADO.NET Entity Framework. Astoria’s appeal is its ability to take relational data and make it a service that can be consumed by client applications in networks and across the Internet. More information about this release can be found in our story, ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3 ships; ups LINQ-to-SQL performance.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Want a Rich Text Editor? Go to CodePlex

Lotta folks have been bringing up the Rich Text Editor, a control written in ASP.NET and JavaScript that has been posted on CodePlex, Microsoft’s code-sharing site.

Kannan Sundararajan wrote the control, but Kirti Deshpande, of Microsoft’s ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit group, is the one who introduced it to the wide world , thanks to a blog entry called Rich Text Editor is here. The features about which he writes include Clipboard support, a context-sensitive toolbar, the ability to format text as code blocks and, crucially, emoticons.

The control was written under the MS-PL license, which is a public license. Rather than summarize the legalese, we’ll just link to the text of the MS-PL license and let you guys exercise your brains a bit.